Ubuntu

Thunderbird or Evolution ?

Asked by martino

In order to have the best portability between Windows mail client as Outlook Express or MS Exchange
and Ubuntu, what is the better choice between Thunderbird and Evolution ? In particular which is suited to read the messages saved with Outlook Express and MS Exchange ?

Thank You and Best Regards

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Pablo Rubianes
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Best Pablo Rubianes (pablorubianes-uy) said : 		#1

I think that in order to use it with a windows mail client thunderbird is better, because there is an add-on to provide mails from hotmail.
and you can download it from http://webmail.mozdev.org/installation.html you have to install the webmail add-on and the hotmail one.

And in order to copy your mails already in your windows system you have to install thunderbird in windows import the mails, and then you can copy you windows thunderbird profile into your linux thunderbird and in this way you have all your preferences set up.
You have to do this:
First set up a new profile in thunderbird, this will get stored under /home/username/.mozilla-thunderbird/xxxxxxxxxx.default (where xxxxxx is some value)
then you have to copy all the files from your windows profile into the linux one. the windows profile is in C:/Documents and Settings/Application Data/Thunderbird/xxxxxx.default in xp or C:\Users\Pablo\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default in vista.
This may or may not include your mail folders, which by default are stored under the profile, but may be customized. In my case, the mail folders were on another drive accessible to both Windows and Linux, so I just let them stay there.

In the profile data is a file called prefs.js. This include the setup of email and newsfeed accounts. In this file are paths to the mail folders. In the Windows profile, these point to something like C:\…\…\. These obviously do not work under Linux, so edit all occurrences to the new path, e.g. something like /home//.thunderbird/xxxxxxx.default/mail/...

Hope this help you.

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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#2

Evolution does considerably more than just send and receive emails and therefore cannot be compared with Thunderbird.

Pablorubianes is quite correct in stating that porting emails from MS Exchange or Outlook Express to Evolution is done via Thunderbird as a staging post.

The simplest solution really would be to install Evolution on your version of Windows and make that your default email client.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/E-mail-Clients/Evolution-for-Windows.shtml

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martino (lrinetti-libero) said : 		#3

Thanks pablorubianes, that solved my question.